Ralph Baric is the O.J. Simpson of Science

Two USC men. Two confessions. Zero accountability.

O.J. Simpson’s trial was the most debated of the 20th century in America. He was an NFL and Hollywood star. In 1994, he murdered his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, leaving a trail of evidence back to his L.A. mansion.

O.J. was put on trial in front of a jury of his peers. Prosecutors presented a DNA case, but the “dream team” of defense lawyers put the L.A. police on trial instead. O.J. never took the stand to defend himself, so the residents of L.A. decided he was innocent because the police were guilty.

Later, O.J. wrote a book and gave an interview confessing to the crime, knowing that under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, he couldn’t be tried again. Let’s now exercise our First Amendment rights and speak freely.

Is this a flawed analogy, since one man murdered, and the other may have perjured? Maybe. But neither will take the stand to defend themselves, so let’s not defend them.

One wielded a knife. The other engineered a genome.

A similar story played out with Professor Ralph Baric. Like O.J., he went to the University of Southern California — not for football, but for virology. There, under Michael Lai, the “Father of the Coronavirus,” Baric learned how to manipulate RNA viruses. They developed a mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) model, which became the biological backbone of Baric’s “No See’m” biotechnology. Lai from USC once quipped, “Viruses are smarter than virologists.”

But unlike O.J., Baric initially confessed to the crime of creating COVID—then went silent. According to O.J.’s own account, he had an accomplice named Charlie.
Baric had many accomplices, including his wife and the FBI.

The wives of lab leak

Congressional letter about Baric to FBI

Baric had the full weight of U.S. academia as his “dream team.” Their first thought was “frightening.” Their next move was telling.

Susan Weiss on Baric’s MHV model

Baric’s “trial by jury” was conducted by his academic peers—scientists who benefit from the same biodefense funding that created COVID. That mansion of scientific prestige was built on grants and tenure. Nobody is rocking this boat. They are the “experts.” The rest of us are just subjects in their lab leak debate.

Over half of these experts knew about the Fauci-funded papers on the Wuhan wet market. But only 22% were aware of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal—a 2018 plan that created a spike protein with a 25% difference from SARS-CoV-1 and a furin cleavage site. The genome described, HKU3r-CoV, now exists as SARS-CoV-2. And Ralph Baric created it.

Professor Susan Weiss of the University of Pennsylvania is an expert on coronaviruses. She wrote the 40-year history of reverse genetic systems. If you closely read what she carefully wrote, only Baric could create a novel genome like SARS-CoV-2. She was among the 22% who had seen the DARPA proposal but still said, “There is nothing suspicious about the fact that we didn’t know what was in their proposal.”

Weiss claimed it wasn’t funded. But it was funded, quietly, through Fauci’s NIAID. Later, Baric perjured himself, claiming he had “forgotten” about the proposal.

Baric was a ghostwriter on this natural origin paper

In February 2020, Baric helped Weiss draft an Emerging Microbes & Infections paper arguing for the natural origin of the virus his lab had created. He provided comments but requested not to be credited. As one co-author admitted, “We don’t want to appear that we are defending Ralph — even though he did nothing wrong.”

Baric “made some text changes” and thanked the academic “community” for writing these cover-up papers. Five years later, publisher EMI admitted Baric and Shi Zhengli were ghostwriters, but not coauthors.

January 2025 EMI addendum

Shi used Vero cells, which delete the furin cleavage site, while Baric used human airway epithelial cells that preserve it. In theory, Baric could have advised labs worldwide to passage SARS-CoV-2 on Vero cells — effectively converting his contagious animal vaccine into an attenuated human one.

Baric even vaccinated his own UNC lab staff during the pandemic. But he watched the world burn, then denied remembering how it started.

A few brave scientists did speak up when the early evidence pointed to China. But now they’re scrubbing their own fingerprints off this academic creation. Baric vanished from public view when DARPA Defuse leaked—only to resurface a year later to accept membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

The message was clear: US academia has your back, Ralph—because no one can touch us. The public still believes China did it, unaware that you engineered a Chinese genome from scratch. You left no trace in the virus, but you did leave your signature in the bureaucracy. The genome sat quietly in the records of the U.S. Patent Office.

Baric collected a different kind of royalty check; his lab nearly tripled in size after COVID. If the arsonist created the fire, his own peers created the smokescreen.

It’s a good read of a good man (or a Wuhan woman) who will face the mob and defend themselves. The post-9/11 Amerithrax letters created a mob around a Fort Detrick virologist named Steve Hatfill.

But Hatfill had never worked directly with anthrax. He wasn’t a bacteriologist, after all; he was a virologist, an expert in viruses like Baric. Unlike Baric, he fought back hard, countersued the government, and won!

Ralph’s colleagues get the morbid joke, do you?

A truth-seeking professor named Paul Keim used biotechnology to trace the anthrax spores to a flask labeled RMR-1029 at Fort Detrick. That flask belonged to Hatfill’s colleague Bruce Ivins, who later killed himself.

Ironically, the whole affair turned NIAID, led by Fauci, into the billion-dollar center of U.S. biodefense. Years later, Fauci would fire Keim from the gain-of-function oversight board. Fauci’s message was clear: follow the GoF line, or lose funding.

Lancet letter and continued cover-up

All of Baric’s colleagues signed a Lancet letter condemning the “conspiracy theories” of a lab origin. All of them, except Baric, who helped write it.

In 2023, an ABC News reporter contacted every author on the Lancet letter, and below is a summary of their internal deliberations. The academic attitude: we will all hang together or we will hang separately.

via new DRASTIC files

Hi Juan and colleagues,

I have told Mark Abdelmalek from ABC News that I would be willing to comment on the record about the likely origin of COVID-19 under the condition that we talked about the evidence the Independent Task Force on SARS-CoV-2 Origins (the original Lancet Commission Task Force on Origins plus two additional members) published in PNAS and not the gratuitous question whether I would still sign the Lancet letter from February 2020.

Nearly all of us who signed the letter in 2020 responded in July 2021 that science and not speculation should be the way forward to learn more about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. We responded then about the 2020 Lancet communique. I totally agree we should not go there again as a collective group.

The questions now focus on what have we learned with confidence based on peer-reviewed studies in high quality scientific journals and not on evidence-free speculations or unavailable confidential information.

Jerry Keusch (who is talking about Danielle Anderson)

Totally agree with this strategy Jerry and happy for you to represent my views when you talk with the reporter.

Peter Daszak of EcoHealth

My view is the following. We have not seen all the information to connect all the dots, and still stand by our message. The ‘low confidence’ is perplexing.

Juan Lubroth

Now The DailyMail has learned that The Lancet is set to publish a second statement by these signatories that presses the case that Covid probably emerged through natural ‘zoonotic’ transmission from animals to humans.”

I don’t think we meant to say this

Charlie Calisher

Follow up on the letter and its status.

I am attaching a pdf from Lancet I received earlier today with their acceptance of the new title, which Josephine Gibson (Correspondence editor liked very much). I have made a one correction which you will see as a comment in the attachment above, which clarifies our issue with the laboratory source last year was focused on a lab engineered virus and not the convoluted but not impossible scenario of the virus being brought in to the lab through bat or other field samples, infecting a worker, who then brought it out to start the human chain transmission and the pandemic. Our call for science to figure out the spillover pathway does not dismiss the so-called “lab-leak” hypothesis but merely points out it is not likely and, by the way, there is no credible evidence for it.

I have also suggested Lancet update the stats on cases and deaths to today, and I provided the numbers from the WHO Dashboard today in an email cover letter to Josephine Gibson.

Lancet is ready to publish online as soon as all of us submit the two forms they require. We are getting very close. So a reminder if any of you still needing to do that, please do so as soon as you can and email it to Brianna and please copy me. If you need the forms or have any problems please get in touch with me as Lancet will be offline for the weekend but I won’t.

Thanks, Jerry Keusch (also U01 CREID subvendor)

Juan, my take is that he’s trying to play one author off against another.

Cynically, I reckon he’s just looking for another provocative but unproductive angle to create more heat, rather than light.

I guess he’s already got us wedged, coz to say nothing could be interpreted as tacit acceptance of the prevailing LL scenario, while counter-arguing that the overwhelming weight of scientific supports a natural origin potentially fuels the fire. Particularly in the wake of Dr Redfield’s recent statement, which has likely prompted the journalist’s renewed interest and approach to us.

Interested to hear how others think we might best proceed.

Hume Field of EcoHealth

Thanks Juan. I’ve already replied to say simply that ‘my view has not changed’.

Best, John Mackenzie

I was also contacted and replied that after 3 plus years and no new data we need to stop debating the past and to pay more attention to investing in the capacities to prevent any future pandemic

Dennis Carroll of USAID Predict

Yes, I have been contacted and did not reply.

Luis Enjuanes (co-author on ENaC research)

Me too.

Sasha Gorbalenya

I agree. I did not reply.

Sad state of affairs,

Jonna AK Mazet of USAID Predict

I too was contacted. In the absence of any verifiable evidence to the contrary, I have not changed my opinion.

Ron Corley

I was also contacted and have not replied. I agree with the comments made by others.

Jim Hughes

Replying just for completeness. I have not been contacted.

If someone wants to show me some new evidence, then very happy to look at it and reconsider. I have not yet seen new evidence that makes me want to reconsider

Cheers Mike Turner

I also received the email and have decided not to reply.

Larry Madoff

Same here….

Bart Haagmans

Likewise- I have not replied.

Kanta Subbarao

I did not reply as well. I don’t see the point in discussing it further. It will not be a healthy dialogue anyway.

Cheers, Leo Poon

Agreed....no response will be made

Rita R. Colwell

Same here. WHO SAGO made an „official“ enquiry regarding the new information they claim to have at Dept of energy, to no avail so far. I still consider telling him about the lack of a reply to WHO, but I am unsure whether that really contributes anything or how that would end up in the reporting.

Christian Drosten

My feeling is that they would use it as more ‘grist to the mill’ Christian.

It’s pretty evident that most media/commentators/authors are only interested in propogating the story for the story’s sake. Any resolution of the question is counter to their interests.

Which is why they ignore/negatively spin the science supporting a natural origin.

Plus the lab leak theory is fundamentally attractive to a significant population cohort, coz it argues that the (emerging zoonoses) problem isn’t theirs/ours/anthropogenic, so we don’t need to change what we’re doing.

I’m at a loss as to how we best deal with the situation. To say nothing potentially allows the misinformation to prevail; to respond fuels the media fire.

Apologies for preaching to the converted.

Hume Field of EcoHealth

A 1960s-era live vaccine circulating in bovines?

Virologist

Rob Gifford

made an interesting discovery: a decades-old virus strain (an AAV called M-wide) is circulating among monkeys and cattle.

If that hypothesis holds, it raises a further question: could laboratory-origin, chimeric viruses have escaped into the wild? Evidence suggests they may have, since we now detect M-wide bearing AAVs in natural contexts: on dairy farms, in monkey colonies.

Their distribution, it could be argued, aligns well with what one might expect from a release via contaminated adenovirus stocks or early live vaccine trials.

Consider AAV-11, isolated in a Japanese primate colony: its rep gene closely matches AAV-10, a primate-specific lineage. But its cap? Pure M-wide.

Could this apparently recombinant virus be the legacy of M-wide’s escape from the lab? A downstream outcome of a quiet moment in an incubator, many decades ago?

Rob Gifford was recently published, but his own university disowned him:

I’m very happy that my latest paper has been published in PNAS.

Sadly, the University of Glasgow declined to issue a press release to accompany my paper on the grounds that it could reinforce SARS-CoV-2 “lab leak” narratives.

In other words, he found a live attenuated vaccine circulating in livestock, but Oxford didn’t want to bring attention to his findings.

More O.J.

For O.J. trial aficionados, it’s a lengthy raw interview, but L.A. detective Mark Fuhrman talks in detail and names the many villains, including himself.

Fuhrman represents everyone in this lab leak debate; somehow, those who do take the stand are the ones who are prosecuted.